


Blue

by thefairyknight



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: F/M, Raptor Motorcycle Gang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 05:06:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4126458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairyknight/pseuds/thefairyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s a sharp little thing in his hands, claws and teeth, a shock of blue underneath the slime on her hide and slitted eyes that fix onto him, already too keen for their own good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue

 

 

Their first attempt with the raptors involves a nest of three – Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Owen isn’t there when they hatch. When he arrives on the scene they’re already three months old. Dangerous, vicious, and above all, insecure. They screech whenever anyone gets too close to the paddocks, and have to be sedated every time they’re moved.

A year after he takes the job, Gamma finds a weak point in the scaffolding and knocks one of the handlers into the pit. It’s over before anyone can get the stun guns out.

A few days later, management makes the call and the trio gets put down. Owen thinks that’ll be the end of it, but maybe it was naïve of him to underestimate Ingen’s dedication to repeating their own mistakes.

He’s there for the hatching, this time. He makes sure of it. There are four of them. The first one breaks her shell and tumbles out with a little screech and a hiss, and he moves without really thinking about it, catching her before she can hit the edge of the nest. She’s a sharp little thing in his hands, claws and teeth, a shock of blue underneath the slime on her hide and slitted eyes that fix onto him, already too keen for their own good.

“Hey there, Blue Girl,” he says, before he remembers that he’s not supposed to get too attached.

She bites his thumb in reply.

~

Owen lobbies for the hatchlings to stay in the same pen until they’re old enough that it becomes a problem. He gets his way, surprisingly easily.

“People upstairs want results,” Claire tells him. “Right now raptors are equal parts liability and opportunity. They’re the single most dangerous dinosaur we have. Visitors keep clamouring for a chance to see them, it’s the most frequent request we get, but until we know how to safely contain them, it’s just not an option. Anything that gets us closer to understanding them, and how to keep them content, gets us closer to actually making _use_ of them as an asset.”

“Oh,” Owen replies. “I thought maybe you were pulling a few strings for me.”

She gives him a baffled look.

“Why would I do that?” she wonders.

“Because you keep checking me out?” he suggests.

She stiffens.

“I don't!”

“Yes you do,” he replies, because frankly, she does. Which doesn’t bother him, really. She’s terrifyingly corporate and seems only vaguely aware of the concept that living beings have emotional needs, which he can admit is a little bit of a weird quirk for the director of a real live dinosaur theme park, but he’s never seen her back down or run away from a challenge, either, and it’s not like he hasn’t thrown her a few glances of his own.

“Would you like to go out?” he asks.

She blinks, taken aback, and he wonders how often she gets asked on dates. Terrifyingly corporate theme park director who spends most of her time on an island full of dinosaurs, tourists, and obsessive nutcases like yours truly? Probably as often as _he_ gets asked out.

“…Alright,” she replies, tentatively, like he’s a bomb that could go off any minute. “Just to be clear, this is a date?”

He smiles.

“Yeah, this is a date,” he confirms.

After the whole thing blows up in his face, he heads out to the raptor pen and sits on the other side of the bars, tossing chunks of raw pork in for the juveniles to devour.

“Who needs human women?” he asks them. “You girls don’t care if I wear board shorts, do you?”

Charlie sticks her head up against the bars and snorts, and he chucks a piece of pork at her nose.

~

Sound. Sound is the most important thing. The girls speak, and Owen is pretty sure it’s like whale song, like a language. They make sounds that human ears don’t even pick up, modulations in tone that they try and replicate with recordings, but somehow they can always tell when it’s fake. He strains his own voice to mimic some of the sounds he can, and it works, a little. But somehow he can’t escape the impression that he’s talking in the dumbest hick accent imaginable.

It’s probably the way Delta _looks_ at him sometimes, when he coughs himself hoarse trying to copy them, like he’s defective and she kind of feels bad for him. Or maybe it’s the way Blue just starts rapid-fire clicking and hissing and coughing back at him, as if she’s scented weakness because he’s clearly stupid and now she’s going to out-campaign him for the role of alpha just by being a better raptor orator.

He drops it. He’s already grossly outmatched against them in a physical fight, he doesn’t need them thinking he’s dumb as a post, too.

Raptor language might be off the table, but sound still works. He’s used the clicker since they were hatchlings, and he starts using English voice commands along with it, sticking to the words he actually understands and trusting them to be smart enough and curious enough to try and figure out what he means on their own.

It’s a good move, trusting in their curiosity. He’s starting to figure them out a little bit, he thinks, although he’s constantly aware that cockiness will still get him killed. And them, too, probably. If some sap falls into their pen he’s got zero doubts about whether or not they’ll tear him to pieces, and what will happen to them afterwards, when the project gets cancelled for a second time.

It’s a bad sign that he’s just as worried for them as for the humans he works with, isn’t it?

~

They’re almost fully grown the first time an accident happens. One of the handlers up on the railing gets too confident and relaxed and leaves his lasso dangling while he talks with his partner, and two seconds later Echo has grabbed it and used it to yank him halfway down.

The guy is dangling like a tasty treat, while his buddy desperately tries to pull him up, and the raptors are jumping at him and trying to catch his legs, and either one of the security guys is going to shoot them or one of them is going to snag his foot before he can get back to safety, and Owen moves without really thinking about it.

“Hey!” he shouts, racing out onto the opposite balcony, arms spread wide.

The raptors actually pause, and look over at him, four sets of reptilian eyes watching him move. He freezes, and Blue glances back at the dangling worker, and he calls out again.

“Eyes on me! Blue, eyes on me!”

She glances back at him, and he knows he won’t be able to hold her attention for long, but mercifully, he doesn’t need to. By the time she looks back, the handler is safely on the balcony again, and Owen forces himself not to sag in relief, and instead goes and grabs a bucket of dead rats and tosses them out, like this was just another training exercise, like they all did it on purpose.

No one is surprised when that handler quits, though.

~

His first replacement is a big dude, tough, talks a lot and makes a show of not being afraid of the raptors.

“No,” Owen decides, three hours into the guy’s first day. “I want him gone.”

When he puts the request through to Claire, he gets a form letter back, telling him to specify the nature of his grievance and describe the candidate’s misconduct and unsuitability for the position. When he tries to call up to her, her secretary redirects him.

One week into things, New Guy decides to discourage Delta from eviscerating a goat they’re using for training by jabbing at her eye with the long end of a pole. The girls rile, hissing and fierce, zeroing in on the scaffolding and the Man With the Pole as a threat, an enemy, and goddamn it Owen has been working _so hard_ to keep them from seeing anyone on this project that way, and he tells himself it’s this knowledge that fuels his anger, that has him storming over to the guy and punching him clean across the jaw.

New Guy falls with a clatter, dropping the pole, cursing, and Owen stands over him.

“What the hell, man?”

“Every ounce of effort I have poured into keeping them from thinking that the people up here are enemies, you have just set back _phenomenally._ You’re done,” he shouts, fists clenched, and before the guy can finish getting out a second protest or even stand up, he grabs him and he _drags_ him away.

He feels the raptors’ eyes watching him the entire time.

He feels his coworkers’ eyes, too.

The next day, he expects trouble, but somehow everyone from raptor to handler seems exceptionally quick to do what he wants.

~

He is seriously starting to wonder if that job is cursed when the third guy to take it falls into the pen, and he knows what’s going to happen if he doesn’t do something, that a man will die but also that the raptors will die, and somehow he’s not sure what’s worse, what he’s trying harder to prevent when he charges in to stop it.

~

Afterwards, he doesn’t really know how to explain it to Claire.

Three of his raptors are dead. The fourth… well, that depends on what happens to the island. So many humans are gone, but when he closes his eyes he keeps seeing raptors explode, raptors burn, raptors torn by teeth and claws, smacked into pillars until they stop moving. He hears Blue, calling for her sisters.

The park is closed. There will never be more raptors on the island. A terrible fate for a pack hunter, to lose her whole pack, with no hope of finding another.

He watches from the ship as the island gets tinier and tinier, and wonders if it would be different, if he’d ever learned to speak raptor. If maybe he’d tried to understand them better. If he’d told everyone to open fire the second he realized what was going on between his raptors and the Indominus, if something could have prevented his pack from turning on them, if they… if…

Claire’s staring at him, and he’s gripping the railing, and there are tears on his cheeks.

“Are you crying?” she asks. “Are you having some kind of breakdown? Should I get a therapist? I think there are therapists. Um… there, there?” She pats his back, awkwardly, clearly concerned and also pretty terrible at handling said concern.

“I’m fine,” he says, simply.

“It’s okay, we’re alive, it’s okay,” she assures him, and he still doesn’t know how to _say_ it, how to explain that three beings he helped raise since infancy are dead and it’s cutting him up inside, but because they were raptors and killers people are only going to view them as another part of the disaster, a few less problems to worry about, and this isn't a thing he can share.

He doesn’t know how to tell her that part of him wants to jump off of the boat and swim back to an island full of free-roaming dinosaurs so he can keep a born killing machine from being too lonely.

“I know,” he says, instead.

 

 

 


End file.
